THE American writer Annie Dillard, who died recently aged 81, and who I value greatly, spent her life paying attention.

In her best-known book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she writes about a young girl who was blind from birth, and whose sight was restored by surgery. When the bandages came off, she was led into a garden. She described what she saw there as “the tree with the lights in it.”

Dillard decided to go looking for her own tree, her own transcendent vision of the natural world. She searched through orchards and woods and seasons. Then one day, walking by the creek near her home, she found it: a cedar, its every cell seemingly alive and ablaze. The ordinary world cracked open to reveal a deep and luminous reality. What she wrote has stayed with me — it was, she said, “less like seeing than like being for the first time seen.”

Autumn in Devon offers us trees with lights in them almost daily. The beech turns copper, the sun catches a field maple so that it seems lit from within. It is easy to drive past of course. There are school runs and work and shopping, the clocks are about to go back, the dark descends. Dillard admits she rarely saw the tree again, but she trusted the light was there whether or not she noticed it.

The shepherd Moses once saw a bush burning in the wilderness, but it was not burnt up. He turned aside to look at it, and only then was he spoken to by God. Wonder, the story seems to say, and as Dillard knew, often begins with simply stopping and looking.

Dillard’s words about being seen go deeper still. Christians believe that we are not only onlookers at a beautiful world, but that we are also looked upon, known and held and loved by the one who made it. In the Bible, a woman called Hagar, who was frightened and alone in the desert, names God as “the God who sees me.” Even when we feel overlooked, we are not unseen.

Perhaps this week we might turn aside for a moment to see a tree light up — like Annie Dillard and Moses did. Perhaps we might notice the luminous world and all its life, even when darkness descends.

For most of us, most of the time, seeing is partial; St Paul said we see “through a glass, darkly”, but that one day the bandages will come off and we will see face to face.

“Now I know in part,” he wrote, “but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Until then, every tree with lights in, every soul, every easily-missed but wondrous thing, is perhaps a foretaste: a reminder that the gift of the world we are looking at is looking back at us with love, seeing our light, too.

Elizabeth Lloyd

Crediton Congregational Church